Biden’s speech to stress urgency of war challenge

WARSAW, Poland — Twenty-five years ago, Joe Biden visited Warsaw, Poland, with a warning: Even though the Soviet Union had collapsed, some of NATO’s original members weren’t doing enough to ensure the alliance’s collective defense.

“Now it is time for the people of Western Europe to invest in the security of their continent for the next century,” said Biden, then a U.S. senator.

Biden, now president, speaks again here Saturday as European security faces its most precarious test since World War II. The bloody war in Ukraine has entered its second month, and Western leaders have spent the week consulting over contingency plans in case the conflict mutates or spreads. The invasion has shaken NATO out of any complacency it might have felt and cast a dark shadow over the continent.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the speech will outline the “urgency of the challenge that lies ahead” and “what the conflict in Ukraine means for the world, and why it is so important that the free world stay in unity and resolve in the face of Russian aggression.”

Biden’s remarks will end a four-day trip that included an earlier stop for a series of summits in Brussels. While in Warsaw, he also planned to visit with Polish President Andrzej Duda and meet with Ukrainian refugees and the aid workers who have been helping them.

Some 3.5 million Ukrainians have fled the country, half of them children, according to the European Union. More than 2 million have gone to Poland. Biden previewed his closing speech during appearances Friday in Rzeszow.

“You’re in the midst of a fight between democracies and oligarchs,” the president told members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division as he visited their temporary headquarters. “Is democracy going to prevail and the values we share, or are autocracies going to prevail?”

During a later briefing on the refugee response, Biden said “the single most important thing that we can do from the outset” to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the war “is keep the democracies united in our opposition.”

Biden praised the humanitarian effort as being of “such an enormous consequence” given the scope of the crisis, which adds up to the largest flow of refugees since World War II. He appeared to lament that security concerns “understandably” will keep him from visiting Ukraine.

Duda, who appeared with Biden on Friday, said the refugees are “guests.”

“We do not want to call them refugees. They are our guests, our brothers, our neighbors from Ukraine, who today are in a very difficult situation,” he said.

The U.S. has been sending money and supplies to aid the refugee effort. This week, Biden announced $1 billion in additional aid and said the U.S. would accept up to 100,000 refugees.

The U.S. and many of its allies have imposed multiple rounds of economic and other sanctions on Russian individuals, banks and other entities in hopes that the cumulative effect over time will force Putin to withdraw his troops.

Biden was scheduled to return to Washington after his speech in Warsaw on Saturday.

Russia appears to be shifting war focus

Russian forces in Ukraine seem to have shifted their focus from a ground offensive aimed at Kyiv, the capital, to instead prioritizing what Moscow calls liberation of the contested Donbas region in the country’s industrial east, officials said Friday, suggesting a new phase of the war.

It appears too early to know where this will lead. Has President Vladimir Putin scaled back his ambitions in search of a way out of the war? The dug-in defensive positions taken recently by some Russian forces near Kyiv indicate a recognition of the surprisingly stout Ukrainian resistance.

On the other hand, Russian forces might be aiming to continue the war with a narrower focus, not necessarily as an endgame but as a way of regrouping from early failures and using the Donbas as a new starting point, one U.S. analyst said.

Putin’s forces are under great strain in many parts of the country, and the United States and other countries are accelerating their transfer of arms and supplies to Ukraine. In recent days, U.S. officials have said they see evidence of Ukrainian defenders going on the offensive in a limited way in some areas. Earlier this week they managed to attack a large Russian ship in port on the Black Sea coast.

Putting a positive face on it all, the deputy chief of the Russian general staff said his forces had largely achieved the “main objectives” of the first phase of what Moscow calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi said Russian forces had “considerably reduced” the combat power of the Ukrainian military, and as a result Russian troops could “focus on the main efforts to achieve the main goal, liberation of Donbas.”

Zelenskyy makes new appeal to end war

In apparent response to Rudskoi, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed anew to Russia to negotiate an end to the war but pointedly said Ukraine would not agree to give up any of its territory for the sake of peace.

“The territorial integrity of Ukraine should be guaranteed,” he said in his nighttime video address to the nation. “That is, the conditions must be fair, for the Ukrainian people will not accept them otherwise.”

A month of fighting has left Russian forces stalled in much of the country, including on their paths toward Kyiv. A senior U.S. defense official said Russian ground forces in the past few days have shown little interest in moving on Kyiv, though they are keeping up airstrikes on the capital.

“At least for the moment, they don’t appear to want to pursue Kyiv as aggressively, or frankly at all. They are focused on the Donbas,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal U.S. assessments of the war.

From the start of the invasion Feb. 24, Putin has been vague in publicly describing his military goals in Ukraine. He said the purpose was to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the government as well as “liberate” the Donbas, a portion of which has been under Russian-backed separatist control since 2014. Putin arrayed more than 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and then pushed them on numerous approaches toward diverse objectives, rather than concentrating on a single strategic goal like Kyiv or the Donbas.

In the four weeks since, Ukrainians have put up a far tougher resistance than Putin likely expected, and Russian forces have been slowed by numerous problems, including weak logistics and perhaps flagging morale.

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking in Brussels, said “it’s too soon to say” whether the Russians have changed their approach. “It shows very clearly that in any case, a (Russian) operation led simultaneously on all sides was thwarted by the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people. That’s what we see for several days.”

Deciphering Moscow not easy

Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia Universitywho has studied U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, said it’s difficult to decipher Moscow’s intent from Friday’s statement.

“It’s plausible that they’re basically trying to ratchet their perceived war aims down to something they’ve already accomplished,” he said, referring to their existing hold on parts of the Donbas. It’s also possible, he said, that they’ve decided they began the war with the wrong approach, with combat forces spread too thin across too many parts of the country. In that case, they might now try to regroup with a central focus on the Donbas and make that the new starting point for an offensive they could later broaden.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank, said Putin might be recalibrating.

“Moscow may be looking for a way out of its Ukraine quagmire,” he said in an email. “Focusing its military goals on control of the Donbas could be a way of scaling back without admitting defeat.”

Denied the quick victory he apparently had expected before launching the invasion, Putin is left with stark choices — how and where to replenish his spent ground forces and whether to attack the flow of Western arms to Ukrainian defenders. A big question concerning that second choice: at what cost if he should escalate or widen the war?

The senior U.S official said it appears Putin intends to draw on Russian forces in Georgia as reinforcements in Ukraine. The official said it was unclear where and in what numbers they might enter Ukraine.

Shortcomings a shock

Russian shortcomings in Ukraine might be the biggest shock of the war so far. After two decades of modernization and professionalization, Putin’s forces have proved to be ill-prepared, poorly coordinated and surprisingly stoppable. The extent of Russian troop losses is not known in detail, although NATO estimates that 7,000 to 15,000 have died in the first four weeks — potentially as many as Russia lost in a decade of war in Afghanistan.

Robert Gates, the former CIA director and defense secretary, said Putin “has got to be stunningly disappointed” in his military’s performance.

“Here we are in Ukraine seeing conscripts not knowing why they’re there, not being very well trained, and just huge problems with command and control, and incredibly lousy tactics,” Gates said Wednesday at a forum sponsored by The OSS Society, a group honoring the World War II-era intelligence agency known as the Office of Strategic Services.

Battlefield trends are difficult to reliably discern from the outside, but some Western officials say they see potentially significant shifts. Air Vice-Marshal Mick Smeath, London’s defense attaché in Washington, says British intelligence assesses that Ukrainian forces probably have retaken two towns west of Kyiv.

“It is likely that successful counterattacks by Ukraine will disrupt the ability of Russian forces to reorganize and resume their own offensive towards Kyiv,” Smeath said in a brief statement Wednesday.

Not long before Putin kicked off his war, some U.S. military officials believed that he could capture Kyiv in short order — perhaps just a few days — and that he might break the Ukrainian military within a couple of weeks.

About 300 died in Mariupol theater

Ukrainian authorities in the besieged ruins of Mariupol said Friday that about 300 people died when a Russian airstrike blew up a theater where hundreds of civilians were sheltering — a catastrophic loss of civilian life that, if confirmed, is likely to further crank up pressure on Western nations to step up military aid.

In a vain attempt to protect those inside the grand, columned theater from missile and airstrikes that Russia has rained down on cities, an enormous inscription reading “CHILDREN” in Russian was posted outside the building and was visible from the air.

For days, the government in the battered port city was unable to give a casualty count for the March 16 attack. The post on its Telegram channel Friday cited eyewitnesses. It was not immediately clear whether emergency workers had finished excavating the theater ruins or how witnesses arrived at the horrific figure of lives lost.

Still, the emerging picture of gruesome casualties could refocus attention on the refusal thus far of countries from the NATO alliance to supply warplanes or fly patrols over Ukraine’s airspace. The country’s embattled president has repeatedly pleaded for those measures to protect against such strikes.

Soon after the attack, Ludmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, said more than 1,300 people had been inside, many whose homes were destroyed in Russia’s siege of the city. The building had a relatively modern basement bomb shelter, and some survivors did emerge from the rubble after the attack.

The new reported death toll came a day after U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders promised after meeting in Brussels that more military aid for Ukraine is coming. But they stopped short of providing heavy weaponry that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants. NATO nations fear that providing planes, tanks and other hardware that Zelenskyy says is urgently needed could increase the risk of them being drawn into direct conflict with Russia.

But the U.S. and the European Union did announce a move to further squeeze Russia: a new partnership to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian energy and slowly squeeze off the billions of dollars the Kremlin gets from sales of fossil fuels.

Civilian misery grows

Despite the efforts to target Russia’s economy to push the Kremlin to change course, the misery for civilians grows ever more acute in cities that, day-by-day, increasingly resemble the ruins that Russian forces left behind in previous campaigns in Syria and Chechnya.

Those who can are trying to flee, emptying out their cities. In relentlessly shelled Kharkiv, mostly elderly women came to collect food and other urgent supplies. In the capital of Kyiv, ashes of the dead are piling up at the main crematorium because so many relatives have left, leaving urns unclaimed.

Meanwhile, the vulnerable — the elderly, children and others unable to join millions of refugees heading westward — face food shortages in a country once known as the breadbasket for the world.

Fidgeting with anticipation, a young girl in Kharkiv watched intently this week as a volunteer’s knife cut through a giant slab of cheese, carving out thick slices — one for each hungry person waiting stoically in line.

Hanna Spitsyna took charge of divvying up the delivery of food aid from the Ukrainian Red Cross, handing it out to her neighbors. Each got a lump of the cheese that was cut under the child’s watchful gaze, dropped chunk by chunk into plastic bags that people in line held open like hungry mouths.

“They brought us aid, brought us aid for the elderly women that stayed here,” Spitsyna said. “All these people need diapers, swaddle blankets and food.”

In other developments:

—In Chernihiv, where an airstrike this week destroyed a crucial bridge, a city official, Olexander Lomako, said a “humanitarian catastrophe” is unfolding as Russian forces target food storage places. He said about 130,000 people are left in the besieged city, about half its prewar population.

—Russia said it will offer safe passage starting Friday to 67 ships from 15 foreign countries that are stranded in Ukrainian ports because of the danger of shelling and mines.

— The International Atomic Energy Agency said it has been told by Ukrainian authorities that Russian shelling is preventing worker rotations in and out of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It said Russian forces have shelled Ukrainian checkpoints in the city of Slavutych, home to many Chernobyl nuclear workers, “putting them at risk and preventing further rotation of personnel to and from the site.”

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Rosa reported from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.